The Glass Room Experience and Data Detox Bar will be held at Stirchley Library on Saturday 4 August as part of Tactical Tech‘s campaign to start a global conversation on data and privacy.

The day has been organised by Fiona Cullinan, who trained as a volunteer at The Glass Room London, a pop-up tech store with a twist. (Curated by Tactical Tech and produced by Mozilla, The Glass Room exhibition and event programme was hosted at 69-71 Charing Cross Road, in the heart of central London, from 25 October – 12 November 2017 and attracted close to 19,000 visitors.)

Materials from The Glass Room will be on display in Stirchley Library as talking points. Open Rights Group Birmingham members will also be on hand to answer questions on the day.

Resources

Here are some simple resources for taking control of your online privacy.

Security in a Box – tools and tactics

8-Day Data Detox Kit

How to reduce data capture across all the common points of online interaction: Google, social media, smartphones, mobile apps, search and browsing. Also, discover what kind of info is being collected about you and how you might be profiled.

“I’ve got nothing to hide”

Find out more about tracking and digital traces – how much of the data collected about you involves behind-the-scenes metadata that can be more revealing than you think. Also busts other common myths about how people think about data privacy.

Photos from the event

Brummies, look into your online life!

Do you feel your digital self is slipping out of control? Clicked “I agree” too many times? Have you ever wondered if your smart gadgets know more about you than you do?

Visit the Glass Room Experience, a pop-up exhibition on Data and Privacy, at Stirchley Library on Saturday 4 August 2018 (10am-4pm) – and find out from more our informational and interactive exhibits on internet giants such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft. (Stirchley Library’s Facebook event page is here.)

There will also be a Data Detox Bar where you can pick up an 8-day Data Detox Kit and ask members of the Birmingham Open Rights Group your questions about how to protect your privacy and secure your information. No technical knowledge is required. Just drop in, view the exhibits and come say hi!

Leading the day will be Fiona Cullinan, who trained and worked as a volunteer ‘Ingenius’ at The Glass Room London, a pop-up tech store with a twist, which ran in London for three weeks in Oct-Nov 2017 and attracted nearly 20,000 people in to look into their online lives. Since then, Fiona has set up Observed.City, a data privacy email for Birmingham, and also co-runs Stirchley data reading group The Interrogang.

I’m a pretty average digital citizen: not particularly techy but I like social networking, and emailing, and searching, and games, and maps, and chat apps… I work remotely and purely digitally for clients anywhere in the world, and the internet is a convenience I can no longer do without.

Here’s the tension…

I also value the right to privacy and I’m worried that the internet is turning into one big tracking system. We are in the process of creating this new world, one that clocks and quantifies our every move, and scores us and targets us. No one fully knows the implications of this, for ourselves and the next generation to come. Worse still, few people are even talking about it, like it’s happening over there somewhere. A lot of stuff is going on in London – for example, The Glass Room, which I was involved in last October – but as a Brummie, I want to raise some awareness about this in my home city. (We have a pop-up version of The Glass Room we can set up if anyone is interested by the way? It’s a great conversation starter.)

I started this newsletter to address some of the challenges in how people engage (or don’t) with data privacy. And because I wanted to see if you can make online privacy and security easier to engage with, perhaps even FUN!

On a more specific personal note, I want to help my friends who are parents of teenagers, kids and toddlers, to navigate these issues with an eye on the future. Data doesn’t die easily and the next generation is growing up to find they already have a record. I am envisioning a family manifesto pinned to the fridge with agreed social media posting permissions, coffee morning support groups in schools, a junior edition of the email edited by my goddaughter (hello Kitty!), data detox workshops and a traffic light system for the bad guys.

And I need to take a holistic view. There are some fascinating projects going on in the second city with big data and open data. This is about navigating the new world not dropping out of it.

So I shall be observing what is going on in my city and curating it into the ObservedCity newsletter once or twice a month. I hope there will be collaborations and guest editors and open discussion and a destination unknown. Let’s start things up!

Companies always say in the small-print terms and conditions: ‘We take your privacy seriously.’ Often they don’t. This is a chance to start taking your privacy seriously.

HELP!

This is a new venture and I need help to spread the word. Please share the newsletter link and this post on to anyone you know who works with data privacy, digital arts, tech or activism in the West Midlands – particularly artists, activists, academics and organisations working with data, and anyone who wants to improve their online privacy and security habits.